In the cellar (April 16, 2011)

originally posted by SFJoe:
Mr. D., not sure I agree that global demand hurts prices for backwater wines. Didier and Catherine, for instance, say that no one in France wants to pay their (crazy low) prices for something with a Touraine AOC, but people in export markets are willing to listen. Ditto Marc Ollivier, etc. etc.

The local markets seem to me to say, "Oh, Marcillac, that's no good," while the export markets might say, "Marcillac? What's that?"
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No, I mean the whole wine-estate explosion thing gets expectations up in certain areas that financial improvement is coming where no improvement is coming. People do not want to pay high prices for unknown items. So prices remain low for these things. Indeed, sometimes people who have trouble selling cheap at home and in traditional markets for these wines may find better receptions abroad with new audiences. What they won't find is anything approaching a breakthrough in pricing.

The fact that Marcillac is available at all in the US and Australia has a lot to do with the prices of wines people do know being so high. A lot of these regions have honestly first-rate vineyards and some of those have great growers too. But their prices stagnate, which is lovely for us on the drinking end. For now. Because in a lot of cases the current young vignerons in these places opted to hang in to take up the clippers with the thought that once people discover what great hillside X can do, prices will rise and we'll get to live well, like the guys in some famous region, more or, more likely, less. But we're not looking for that on this end. Sure, one or two here or there can break through to cult status, and we can deal with that. But on the uptake end, we're generally looking for good wine cheap. We do not want or need more expensive wine. So this last twenty or thirty years has seen us drawing more and more people from more long-ignored regions into the supply channel. More people are drinking wine but fewer people can afford the things that kept the fine-wine trade happy twenty-five years ago. Large quantities of Bordeaux are lost, for example, to a crew of Chinese yuppies who cut it with Pepsi instead of aging it. I agree, the Lafite improves the Pepsi. But now the rest of us need something good to drink on the nights we do not cash out a giant trust fund or sell a corporation.

Hello estate bottling and boutique negoce boom. It's all good if the peasants are already local heros and maybe do a reliable tourist trade. If, however, we're talking people who see international distribution as a ticket to a better life, it's not happening. And in these cases, this ugly reality will leave people staring at steep slopes after a bad freeze thinking about how much they can get if they sell the vineyards - maybe to a real-estate developer.
 
Don't joke about Oxycontin. Those of us who need to eat it like candy suffer every time another moron listens to that kind of talk and imagines something good is going to come of what looks like it'll be a little braggable opiate abuse. These are just the morons who need to be tied down when they're finally forcibly detoxed.

There are much better recreational drugs out there. And they're cheaper and much less prone to stopping your breathing.
 
originally posted by Mr. Doghead:
If, however, we're talking people who see international distribution as a ticket to a better life, it's not happening. And in these cases, this ugly reality will leave people staring at steep slopes after a bad freeze thinking about how much they can get if they sell the vineyards - maybe to a real-estate developer.
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So, in your view, they either get out now or whenever they run out of hope?
 
In my view you do that work because you love the work and\or the life. I was not discussing my view. Sometimes people don't love the work. So let us may one of them me and say while I may love my village and friends and may have stuck it out in some past era for that reason and for my kids, now the situation is much more conflicted. We're all bombarded now with suggestions that what we have is not enough, that we need more, that we should do more, that our kids are going to hate us and to be failures if we can't send them to the right schools, that everyone but the locals has an iPhone and fancy cars, that we need new appliances and a better internet subscription and a few extra rooms in the house, and we get to feeling maybe have the wind paralyzing my pruning hand while I cling to a goaty hillside at 6 in the morning isn't the optimal way to get there, what with my American importer telling me that with my wine priced at 8 he won't be able to move any quantity except in NY and SF, and that only if I'm willing to spend a couple of weeks pouring wine to key clients in those places. My importer has no trouble selling wine from down the road at CDP for some multiple of that, I seem to see when I visit, so I'm wondering why we can't raise the prices, but if I can't, my kids and my family are obviously at an untenable disadvantage.

And on and on. Some of it is neurosis, some of it is undead tradition, some of it may wind up indeed changing as the climate works its magic, and some is personal choice, but I find it interesting and distressing how this expansion of variety available that I and many others worked to bring about and that I used to view as a young person as an end in itself has come with so much baggage and with unintended consequences. Of course. We're opening up the country-wine scene as the world changes and that way of life changes.
 
My neighbor in Violes--who sold his grapes to the coop and never made any wine that anybody imported--had his vineyard torn out because it was costing him more money to do the work than he could get for the grapes. If an importer is even talking to you, you are doing well. Except for name labels, no importer wants to bring in and try to introduce a wine that will cost more than $20 here. Generally, that means an ex-cave cost of 10 euros and considerably less to importers. And of course Rhone wines are not an undiscovered region. It must be a lot harder elsewhere.

On the other hand, young people do not seem to want to leave the region, if they can find any kind of work, some of it a lot less rewarding than farming vines. As one of my neighbors said to me, "we know we live in paradise." I suppose people in non-paradisal parts of France feel differently.
 
originally posted by Cole Kendall:
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
It is going to become gelato. (I also have a LeNotre recipe.)
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Let me know how the ice cream comes out. The recipe booklet has lots of savory stuff as well.
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Last night I made the goo (milk, sugar, corn starch). Today I whisked in the crema and a few drops of lemon juice, and then churned it (tossed in a few whole nuts towards the end). It's resting in the freezer now but I can already tell you this is a winner, plausibly ranked "OMG" but let's check the final texture before I make the call.

Licking out the jar, the mixing bowl, the churning bowl and paddle, the spoon, the whisk, and the spatula was necessary before washing, of course.
 
originally posted by Mr. Doghead:
originally posted by SFJoe:
Mr. D., not sure I agree that global demand hurts prices for backwater wines. Didier and Catherine, for instance, say that no one in France wants to pay their (crazy low) prices for something with a Touraine AOC, but people in export markets are willing to listen. Ditto Marc Ollivier, etc. etc.

The local markets seem to me to say, "Oh, Marcillac, that's no good," while the export markets might say, "Marcillac? What's that?"
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Large quantities of Bordeaux are lost, for example, to a crew of Chinese yuppies who cut it with Pepsi instead of aging it. I agree, the Lafite improves the Pepsi. But now the rest of us need something good to drink on the nights we do not cash out a giant trust fund or sell a corporation.
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For someone so sanctimonious about vintage generalizations, this is some serious racist bullshit. I have a lot of Chinese friends, probably folks that you would consider yuppies because they are smart and have good jobs (because they are willing to study hard, unlike stupid lazy white kids). I do not know a single one who mixes their wine with Pepsi. Or Coke.

I had Coke mixed with Rioja while in Spain as I understand it is a cocktail there. Not bad.
 
A lot of this is just a currency problem. In the last 10 years the relationship between the dollar and the euro has inverted. As exporters, this has killed small vignerons whose wines have no elasticity in price. Combine this with a domestic market where consumption is plummeting and you have the inevitable. Europe, and the French especially, have a sort of agriculture bubble due to state support (much as we have a corn bubble here).

Squeezing producers out of the market is a natural consequence of this, much like low end manufacturing moving to countries where it is cheaper.

One hopes that the vines ripped up will all be ones from the lesser terroir and that excellent terroir, like Marc's, will continue on. Some of the babies may be thrown out with the bathwater, unfortunately. But maybe American boutique investment bankers can come to the rescue in Muscadet, one never knows.
 
Welcome back, Robert, and as always I appreciate you contributions to the conversation. But I have to respectfully disagree.

Some appellations may get lost in the shuffle, but others manage to make the breakthrough.

A generation ago, only the most serious and knowledgeable of Rhône freaks appreciated the greatness of Cornas, and so from the beginning of the 1970s to the late 1980s, the only young person who didn't leave to work elsewhere in a different calling was Robert Michel. Checked the prices recently of the top Cornas producers? And the best sites of St-Joseph are beginning to get the recognition they've long deserved.

Ditto for Bandol. Or Gauby in Roussillon.

Want something more dramatic? Who ever heard of Wicker or Pünderich? But Flick and Busch have no trouble selling their wines because they truly are top class and from demonstrably outstanding sites. If wines from Kobern aren't getting what Busch is getting for his wines from Pünderich, well, all you have to do is taste them side by side to see why.

The Southern Pfalz used to be known only for the size of its harvests of wine that supplied the lowest classes of negociants. But now some of the greatest wines of Germany are coming out of there: red as well as white. (Indeed, as some of the southern Pfalz vineyards are actually in Alsace, one scratches one's head in wonder why the Alsatians aren't producing wines of anywhere near the same quality).

Perhaps the only area held in even lower regard than the southern Pfalz was the interior Rheinhessen: it went a step further than the southern Pfalz and was planted in such atrocities as Optima. It was the trash heap of Germany. Now, producers such as Wittmann, Keller, Groebe, Battenfeld-Spanier, and others have demonstrated that they can regularly produce some of the world's greatest Rieslings -- not from slate soils, but from limestone!

Anyone ever heard of Bockenau? Not until some kid named Tim Schäfer came along and showed what could be done with its best site, and now many knowledgeable palates will tell you that he is making wines that are even greater than those of his mentor, Helmut Dönnhoff.

I certainly never would have thought of paying more than $10-15 for a bottle of wine from Umbria until I tasted Bea's wines. They're worth every penny, even if US markups can be severe.

And then there's Austria. Not only unknown, plagued by a terrible scandal. And yet, they've managed to overcome all that and earn their deserved respect.

Etc., etc.*

As for Marcillac, I've never visited and the only ones I've had have been from Matha, so I may have revelations yet to come, but based on the bottles I've purchased and drunk in the past, I fail to see the potential for great quality that the above-referenced producers and regions have demonstrated.

I do think in today's world, if you are producing top quality wines, the world will find you and within a reasonable time you will get a price that allows you to live quite decently from your work -- not at the level from even mediocre producers of Burgundy or bad producers of classified Bordeaux, but still well enough.

* A sad variant is that in some regions, such as the Languedoc, it is the medium-priced wines (which these days do allow the producers to live reasonably well) that are the best, while the high priced wines are badly spoofed. I think with time, the situation will right itself (although it may take a while -- Côte-Rôtie is largely still a mess after more than twenty years of spoofing by many producers).
 
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